Oxford University bans Spotify

As we used to flippantly say in the 1990s, Spotify is the “jam.” Although only available in select European Internet users for now, the service — most aptly described as iTunes in the cloud — has garnered amazing press for its combination of a vast media library, great sound quality and low-to-free monthly cost. Best of all? It’s totally legal. Not that that stopped Oxford University from banning it from their network.

It’s a mystifying decision. Initially, IT workers at Oxford University banned the application, claiming that it was a “P2P program” and that any P2P program is prohibited on the network. Seemingly aware even as they said that that Spotify is not a P2P application, they then amended that statement to also mention that Spotify is a bandwidth hog. When it was pointed out that Spotify was far less a bandwidth hog than, say, YouTube, the University said that the service was banned because it “could not be justified as educational.” Really? Music isn’t a humanity, or has Oxford stopped teaching those?

Basically, it all feels like postactive justification by a University administration who made a decision based upon their unfamiliarity with the software. Still, this is a magnitude of stupid: by cutting their students off from a totally legal source of free music, Oxford is ironically just encouraging illegal music downloading through other sources. Aren’t you Oxford guys supposed to be smarty pants or something?